Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

New judge named in Microsoft, EU case

Filed under
Microsoft

Microsoft's appeal against a European Union antitrust order will be heard by Bo Vesterdorf, the judge who rejected the company's attempt in December to suspend the decision.

The European Court of First Instance in Luxembourg said yesterday that it told Microsoft and regulators that the case had been moved to the Grand Chamber, which is led by Vesterdorf. The case had originally been assigned to a five-judge panel led by Hubert Legal.

"Microsoft will be delighted with this," Ronald Cass, president of the legal consulting firm Cass & Associates and a consultant to Microsoft, said in an interview in Monaco. "The prior chamber was more skeptical about Microsoft's position.
Vesterdorf is a very open and thoughtful fellow, and that's all Microsoft can ask for."

But Thomas Vinje, a Brussels, Belgium, attorney who represents Microsoft competitors involved in the case, said the change is neutral.

"I do not believe it is likely to have any significant effect in either direction, but in any event I do not believe it is likely to enhance Microsoft's chances of success," he said.

The Redmond company, whose software runs more than 90 percent of the world's personal computers, was ordered by the European Commission in March 2004 to license information about the inner workings of its Windows operating system to competitors. The company said the EU decision would cause "irreparable harm" to its business.

The commission, the EU's antitrust regulator, fined Microsoft a record $593 million as part of its March 2004 decision.

"We look forward to presenting our case," said Tom Brookes, a Microsoft spokesman. Commission spokesman Jonathan Todd declined to comment.

Legal, who was the reporting judge for the case, has been replaced in that role by Irish Judge John Cooke, the court said.

Cass said Vesterdorf took the unusual step of taking over the case because of Legal's controversial comments in an editorial published in the French legal magazine Concurrences. Legal called clerks at the court "ayatollahs of the free market."

"Judge Legal compromised himself by making those comments," Cass said.

In Microsoft's U.S. antitrust case, a U.S. appeals court overturned former Judge Thomas Jackson's order to break up the software giant and disqualified him from overseeing further proceedings in the case because he had granted interviews to reporters during the trial.

The EU court's Grand Chamber last assembled to hear arguments on whether World Trade Organization rulings are binding in EU member states.

In the past two years, rulings by Vesterdorf and other judges have highlighted the Court of First Instance's growing role as a check on the commission's power, overturning three antitrust decisions.

Source.

re: You know...

Good point! But few rarely are I'd bet.

----
You talk the talk, but do you waddle the waddle?

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.